To Swaziland for a day

OK, so it will be more of a wild and brief road trip than a proper voyage of exploration – but my camera and I and a good friend will be off to see Swaziland this weekend. It’s one of the perks of living in South Africa that we have the two vassal states of Lesotho and Swaziland which, although accepted internationally as real, bona-fide nations, are relatively nearby nuggets of land embedded in the superstructure of South Africa. This makes it possible to visit them in a weekend and make it back while still having time to do more than watch the world blur past a bug-encrusted windscreen.

This particular plan, like any good one, came about as a result of typical friendly one-upmanship over coffee earlier this week, in a conversation taking the form of:

Mabasa: Lets’s go and do something interesting this weekend.

Richard: I know – why not drive about four hours and see what we can see. And then explore around there.

Mabasa: Sounds great. In what direction though?

Richard: Ummm. Not sure. Wait. Can’t we reach Swaziland in about that time?

And the rest, as they say, is history. The finer details are sketchy, but we have a tent. Which provides us with enough misplaced courage that accommodation will ‘sort itself out’ that we will be leaving on Driday night, winging it for the next two nights and returning on Sunday. Hopefully with some interesting memories and pretty photographs in the bag. And on this blog.